Part of the decision was Robbie’s burgeoning film career. He’s on his way to being a very big star, which he completely deserves both professionally and personally. We didn’t want to stand in the way of that. As always, sometimes those tough decisions yield the best storytelling because obviously Ronnie’s death has a major impact on all the characters, Barry, Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker), Professor Stein. It also gave us a lot of our storytelling as we move forward. Everyone knows there’s a second spin-off coming with Legends of Tomorrow. They know the Firestorm legacy is far from over, so it just gave us a lot of rich storytelling to pursue.

Robbie recently posted the photo below on Instagram and said, “Firestorm is in great hands. But I’ll be back”

Last week Zap2it.com published an interview with Andrew Kreisberg that got me excited about the introduction of Jefferson “Jax” Jackson. Below are some relevant quotes explaining this new version of Firestorm will be more like the comic version! Hooray!

When deciding to give Dr. Stein another second half, executive producer Andrew Kreisberg explains how the team wanted the new Firestorm to be different from Ronnie but inevitably closer in resemblance to the comic book lighthearted spirit of the character.

“In the comic books Ronnie was like a dumb jock. Obviously, Robbie and the character that we created for our Ronnie was obviously an engineer and was more mature and has a girlfriend. He was more of an adult,” Kreisberg explains to Zap2it and a group of journalists at an episode preview event. “The idea of a second firestorm being somebody who was just in his early 20s and somebody who was radically different from [Robbie’s] Firestorm.”

That’s not to say that Jax is a dumb jock — he had a 4.0 GPA in high school, but his lack of science background creates a fun dichotomy between him and Dr. Stein that more closely resembles the chemistry between the scientist and Ronnie in the comic books.

Can’t wait to see Jax on-screen tonight! Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!

Of course, the Flash’s Ronnie really *wasn’t* the original. He bears only a passing resemblance to the comic character. Indeed, as the article above shows, Jax is actually closer to comic-Ronnie in many important respects.

Nah… weird would have been what ran through my head when Stein started in with the blue flames last episode — fuse Caitlin with Stein for Firehawk (it really reminded me of her second costume look), with the Killer Frost teases we’ve seen so far actually being Earth-2 Caitlin the whole time. Talk about a mixed up meeting there… and what would Clarissa think?

I’d love to see this question actually addressed by the producers. Best guess is simply that, having established a Jason on-screen, but being unable to get the actor back (and/or having established Jason as another scientist-type, and wanting to get a more “classic jock” type character, like the original comics had) they decided to go in another direction.

Seriously, though, I think we need to look past the names used for the characters, and more to the personalities. Jax is, in many ways, going to make for a more classic-feeling Firestorm than we were likely to get with Ronnie or Jason as their personalities had been established on this show so far.

I haven’t read the other comments yet, so I won’t be biased— I loved it. Just loved it. I thought the idea of using Jefferson was astute— they have been doing such wonderful shout-outs to the hardcore readers of the 80s Firestorm series. Can it be much longer before we discover Zoom is really the love child of Cliff Carmichael and Doreen Day?

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